Johan Bergström

Dear readers, since a year I am responsible for the running of the Master Program in Human Factors and Systems Safety at Lund University. The program is a one-year master that we give over two years (so half-time effort expected from the students) and the program is targeted to professionals and practitioners within safety-critical industries worldwide. The course which started in January 2012 have representatives from aviation, nuclear industry, healthcare, construction, railway and fire safety engineering and the students represent countries such as Canada, USA, Australia and Finland.

We run this program as commissioned education, meaning that the tuition fee is covered by the student's employer. For 2012 the tuition fee is 70 000 SEK for each of the two years that the student is enrolled in the program.

Studies in this program are distance-based with three exceptions. There are three mandatory so called learning laboratories during the first year (in January, June and November…

Dear readers, after a really nice summer vacation I am back in the office! Defending the dissertation was a great end of a really tough spring semester. I am now looking forward to have more time for out master students in Human Factors and Systems Safety, to hopefully accept a new group of students for 2013 and to shape my professional life to come for the next couple of years.

What I wanted to tell you all now is that I just got another article published in a scientific journal. It is maybe the most important paper of my doctoral dissertation, entitled The Social Process of Escalation: A promising focus for crisis management research. In my dissertation this is paper no. I amongst the appendixes. In the thesis it is presented as "submitted", however just a couple of weeks prior to the dissertation defence we got the message that it was accepted. Now it is published in the open access medical journal BMC Health Services Research for you all to view and download (being open…